Daniel Coronell

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Bogotá, May 1, 2015--The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the sentencing on Thursday by the Colombian Supreme Court of two former senior government officials for their roles in an illegal surveillance program. The program, which occurred while former President Álvaro Uribe was in office, involved spying on some of the country's most prominent journalists as well as judges, human rights activists, and opposition politicians, according to news reports.

Seven months after Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa flirted
with the idea of offering asylum to former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden, intercepted communications and leaked emails are again making
headlines in the Andean country. This time, the story is not about
international surveillance but a window onto the latest front in the
ever-escalating war between the president and his critics.

A Colombian TV news director, who
oversaw hard-hitting political coverage in central Antioquia department, resigned on June 28 after his editorial
meeting was secretly recorded and used by politicians to push for his ouster.

More
than a year after he left office, Álvaro Uribe Vélez confessed that "it was
not in him" to live as a former president. And in fact, having dominated
Colombian politics for eight years, it has been impossible for Uribe to fade
from the public eye since leaving office in August 2010. Instead of retiring to
his ranch in Antioquia, he has lived in a heavily protected compound in the
capital, Bogotá, with his wife and two sons. He spends his time traveling
abroad for speaking engagements, has been a scholar at Georgetown
University, and more recently announced the creation of
a new political platform to oppose current President Juan Manuel Santos.

In 2005, a series of chilling death
threats compelled award-winning Colombian journalist Daniel Coronell to leave
Bogotá with his family for what ended up being a two-year stay in California. Today,
more than three years after his return from exile, Coronell and his family are moving
back to the States, this time by choice. CPJ spoke to him last week about how
his return U.S. to take on a high-level position at a major TV network compares
to his exile in 2005, and the press freedom conditions he's leaving behind in
Colombia.

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The topic being investigated by two Colombian reporters was explosive enough that it required unusual security. Fearful that the subjects would learn prematurely of the story, the reporters took separate notes, which they did not share and which they later destroyed. They didn’t communicate by telephone or e-mail, and they met only in public locations. They relayed only the barest information to their own sources.

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Your Excellency: We are writing to express our grave concern at the detention of our esteemed fellow journalist Maziar Bahari and to request his immediate release. Mr. Bahari has been detained since June 21. No charges have been brought against him, and he has not been granted access to a lawyer. As one of the most impartial and committed journalists in his field, he has reported regularly over the past decade from the Middle East, principally from Iran and Iraq, and provided consistently balanced and insightful reports. As an award-winning documentary filmmaker, he has earned global respect for his work.

Daniel
Coronell's name didn't come up in a hearing this week on Capitol Hill, even
though CPJ had just learned that a Colombian court had ordered the arrest of the
respected Canal Uno TV reporter and Semana magazine columnist over his work.
Coronell is one of many journalists and human rights monitors
who've lately been forced to defend themselves against irregular, if not bogus, criminal charges brought in Colombian courts. The hearing held by
the Tom
Lantos Human Rights Commission of the House Foreign Affairs Committee did,
however, hear important testimony from one of Coronell's colleagues.

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New York, March 25,
2009--A court in Colombia has issued an arrest warrant for prominent journalist
Daniel Coronell for contempt of
court after he failed to correct for a second time a story linking a local
businessman to drug trafficking, the Committee to Protect Journalists learned
today. CPJ calls on the judge to withdraw the contempt ruling until an appeal
is heard.